Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my new wargaming blog to keep track of my efforts to wargame the course of the human empire in space. I suppose that at this early point, a basic statement of intent is best, just to set out what I'll be trying to achieve here. This is:

1) The blog will cover the progress of mankind in a future sci-fi setting, as he expands out from earth into a randomly generated universe. The idea of the campaign game will be to have an innate problem between an outward drive for expansion from earth, plus a growing problem with holding the empire together as it grows and expands across the universe. The result should hopefully be a constant growth, fracturing, stagnation, collapse and rebirth of various sub-empires and factions within the overall area of 'human space.'

2) I want this to be effectively a demonstration of what can be achieved with a bit of imagination, rather than a lot of hard work buying and painting models, so I will be doing this largely with inspiration from the internet, some sheets of paper and some pens, plus whatever models or counters I can rustle up myself for tabletop battles.

3) There's got to be conflict - not just global-scale, but inter-global-scale! The best sci-fi worlds are dystopias, so life, frankly, will be cheap in my 'paper empire.' Just be glad it's not real! The setting will be generic sci-fi of the near-future initially, but I hope to see the game evolve in any number of surprising ways over time, hopefully with it's own distinct character beginning to form. Narrative development will be a big part of it all, with random dice-rolls and the outcomes of various space & land battles deciding the course taken.

4) Combat will be with spaceships (naturally) but also with large ground-based armies, as I have a liking for exotic technology and even more exotic environments where the protagonists can compete.

That's about all I want to list at this early stage, until a bit more has been done to give things a 'lead'. In any case, I hope for now that you enjoy a browse, and maybe get inspired yourself!